First Chapter ~ First Paragraph (January 15)

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, from Tuesday/First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Vicky from I’d Rather Be At The Beach who posts the opening paragraph (sometime two) of a book she decided to read based on the opening. Feel free to grab the banner and play along.

Well my reading pace has picked up in 2019 and I’m delighted to share the opening from a book I plan to read very soon indeed; The Stone Circle by Elly Griffiths is the eleventh episode in the Dr Ruth Galloway series which is due to be published on 7 February 2019.

Blurb

DCI Nelson has been receiving threatening letters telling him to ‘go to the stone circle and rescue the innocent who is buried there’. He is shaken, not only because children are very much on his mind, with Michelle’s baby due to be born, but because although the letters are anonymous, they are somehow familiar. They read like the letters that first drew him into the case of The Crossing Places, and to Ruth. But the author of those letters is dead. Or are they?

Meanwhile Ruth is working on a dig in the Saltmarsh – another henge, known by the archaeologists as the stone circle – trying not to think about the baby. Then bones are found on the site, and identified as those of Margaret Lacey, a twelve-year-old girl who disappeared thirty years ago.

As the Margaret Lacey case progresses, more and more aspects of it begin to hark back to that first case of The Crossing Places, and to Scarlett Henderson, the girl Nelson couldn’t save. The past is reaching out for Ruth and Nelson, and its grip is deadly. Amazon

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First Chapter ~ First Paragraph ~ Intro

CHAPTER 1

12 February 2016

DCI Nelson,

Well, here we are again. Truly our end is our beginning. That corpse you buried in your garden, has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? You must have wondered whether I, too was buried deep in the earth. Oh ye of little faith. You must have known that I would rise again.

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This is actually one of my favourite of all the series that I follow and I am seriously excited to be meeting up with Nelson and Ruth again especially as the start of this letter is weird. What corpse is in Nelson’s garden?

That is a great opening as it raises so many questions in the reader’s mind. There’s something chilling about it because the writer seems disturbed, to say the least, and seems to have an unsettling degree of knowledge about Nelson.

This is an excellent series, isn’t it, Cleo? And those letters are such an intriguing way to start a book! I’m definitely interested, and I hope you’re really enjoying this one. Griffiths is so talented!